CTV B.C. news anchor Tamara Taggart is one of five local media personalities whose private medical record were accessed by a clerical employee at Vancouver Coastal Health.Handout
/ CTV

CTV B.C. news anchor Coleen Christie is one of five local media personalities whose private medical record were accessed by a clerical employee at Vancouver Coastal Health.Malcolm Parry
/ Vancouver Sun

Three Vancouver CTV personalities – anchors Coleen Christie and Tamara Taggart and health expert Dr. Rhonda Low – are among the people whose medical records were improperly accessed by a clerical employee at the local health authority, the network has revealed.

The female Vancouver Coastal Health staff member has been fired after she admitted to taking a peek at the records of five local members of the media. The files were accessed through the authority’s electronic records system on multiple occasions in October and November.

CTV News revealed in their 6 p.m. newscast that the three high-profile employees had been targeted, and Taggart told viewers that “it’s really unsettling that an employee was snooping through files.”

The identities of the remaining two targets are unknown. Radio station News 1130 confirmed Thursday that one of the five media personalities involved works for their station, but would not identify the person or comment further.

Officials say the breach was discovered late last month during a routine internal audit, adding the employee was officially terminated on Thursday morning.

“That a staff member would breach a patient’s right to privacy is extremely disappointing and violates the confidentiality agreement that must be signed by each of our employees,” Vancouver Coastal Health president David Ostrow said in a statement released Thursday.

“It also violates the trust people place in us, and we apologize not only to those directly impacted by this, but to all our patients, clients and residents.”

Vancouver Coastal Health would not identify the employee — or the victims of the breach — with a spokesman saying only that the employee “had legitimate access to health records as part of their work,” and that “they were not a clinician, they were not a doctor or nurse, but they provided support to a clinical area.”

The Vancouver Sun has learned the employee was a female clerical worker who had been with Vancouver Coastal Health for several years.

Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham issued a statement Thursday, saying she’d been contacted about the breach on Wednesday and will be investigating.

“It is deeply troubling when an employee who has legitimate access to personal information on the job abuses that privilege. What is most concerning about this case is that it involves sensitive, personal health data,” she said.

“Secure and controlled access to personal data is fundamental to building and maintaining trust in the health care system.”

Vancouver Coastal Health has reached out to all who were involved in the breach, spokesman Clay Adams said Thursday.

“We’re really embarrassed about this happening and we apologized,” he said, adding Vancouver Coastal Health has strict protocols in place to protect private information.

In a news release, Vancouver Coastal Health said: “The employee had signed a written undertaking where they agreed: ‘to adhere to the VCH Information Privacy and Confidentiality Policy … I understand that compliance with confidentiality is a condition of my employment with VCH and that failure to comply may result in immediate termination of my employment’”

Adams added that electronic health records are “layered,” and said the employee in question accessed only basic personal details, not intimate health information.

“The individual admitted to us, as was confirmed through our investigation, that they only looked at the initial demographic details: basically who the person was, where they lived, that kind of stuff,” he said.

“They didn’t delve into their medical file. “

Adams said the fired employee said she did the searches out of “curiosity” and did not share any of the information with anyone else.

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